Love is All You Need

“Let me be marked by love”

These are words I pray on a daily basis.

I pray those words because I know that love is the most powerful thing there is. I know it has the power to change people and situations, to bring healing, to make a way for forgiveness, to break the things that bind, to make a way for the possible in the impossible. Why do I know these things? Because I know love is God and God is love. I know it because I have seen it worked out in my life and in the lives of others.

But often I am guilty of buying into the lie that love is always a beautiful thing, always easy, always clean and tidy, that it should always leave you with that warm, fuzzy feeling. But this year that has been one of my biggest lessons. Love is an amazing thing but it is not always an easy thing. Why? Because we are called to love broken and messy people, because we are broken and messy people, sometimes love hurts, sometimes it means not being able to do right for doing wrong, sometimes it is confusing, sometimes you will get it wrong.

I look at this world though, with all the craziness that goes on, and another year that has bought tragedy, political confusion and uncertainty, fear, division and then I look at that little baby in a manger and I know that they only way will always be to keep choosing love, to keep asking God to let me be marked with love, because that baby was and is love, that baby changed the world and will keep changing the world.